THE IDEOLOGICAL TRANSFORMATION OF THE PUBLIC SPHERE: THE CASE OF TURKEY

Jurgen Habermas's book The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere has attracted considerable attention in recent discussions regarding the relationship between the public and private spheres. The book was first published in the 1960s atmosphere of political radicalism. In the foreword to the new edition published in 1989,1 Habermas considers his work a natural outcome of recent tendencies toward democratization. According to Habermas, the structural transformation of the public sphere is a development from the bourgeois public, which takes the "homogenous" and "abstract" individual as the focal point, to a "differentiated" public created by civil society in social life.